**Backlog of Africa Posts**

I've decided to archive all of my old update emails that I sent out from Mali. I apologize for those who already had to suffer through these descriptions once, but you can always skip to the new stuff! At any rate, it might be interesting to see our evolution through the two years.

Dear Friends:

Tomorrow morning Andrew and I are beginning our first step in our Peace Corps journey. We fly from Ontario, California to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. For three days we will meet with the other 84 volunteers traveling to Mali and get all of our vaccinations (Oww!). On July 19th, we'll fly from Philly to Paris and finally to Bamako, the capital of Mali. From there we'll have about 8-12 weeks of training. We'll be improving and (hopefully) perfecting our French, and also learning the local language of Bambara. We'll also get training in our specific jobs (for me, Health Education, for Andrew, Natural Resource Management) and we'll learn how to take care of ourselves out there. After that, we'll be placed in a community somewhere in Mali. We won't know more until we complete the training. Our service ends September 21, 2009, but we won't be making any trips home to the U.S. before then. Therefore, we encourage all of our friends to broaden their horizons and come visit the beautiful continent of Africa. We'll even make room for you in our mud hut! ;)

Our bags are packed!

We'll miss all of you, and we would REALLY appreciate any mail you can send us while we're away. We will probably have email access once a month, and we plan on sending out updates to all of you on this list (if you want to be removed, let me know!). Our address is as follows:

Us at the Philly airport

Nicole & Andrew Wallace, PCV

Corps de la Paix

B.P. 85

Bamako, Mali

West Africa

In addition, please send all email to nicoledcwallace@gmail.com or taurendur@gmail.com. We won't have a lot of time to check multiple email accounts, so it'd be best to send email to this account.

Good luck to you all in the next two years!

K'an b'u fo!